One theory of what life is is a climb to the vista of greatest potentiality. You're more alive, healthier, when you have more possible choices, when there are more paths you could take.

In a sense health is just functionality. A healthy body can do many things; a sick body can do fewer things; a dead body can't do much. The same for the mind. Health is functionality is freedom, or potential freedom. And the kind of life we know and love evolves toward freedom. We're similar to chimpanzees and bonobos but individually we have more potentials than they do currently. That's what makes us more "advanced," according to this perspective.

If you understand life this way, it ties in with entropy, and helps give a scientific basis to morality. Morality is actually about freedom. What do you do with freedom to increase it, rather than reduce it?

Sometimes we dedicate ourselves to something and block out a lot else. That's sacrificing some kinds of freedom for more of another. It's like trading currencies.

Maybe we aren't free at all. Maybe the universe is fully deterministic. But I don't believe that.

Why would I? Do you? There's nothing to gain from believing it - nor would we have the choice either way if it's true - and everything to lose from believing it if it's false. If you believe in total determinism in a deterministic universe, that's the universe dictating what you believe (and no thanks to you that you're a good mirror, in a sense). If you believe in total determinism in a partly non-deterministic universe, that's squandering your probably greatest, probably most definitive asset.